Host Cornelius Eady introduces an exploration of the intricacies and pleasures of translation in a conversation between Polish poet Krystyna Dąbrowska and her translator, poet Karen Kovacik, in celebration of Dąbrowska’s new collection, Tideline.
Krystyna Dąbrowska is a Polish poet, essayist, and translator living and working in Warsaw. She is the author of five poetry collections and has won many awards for her poetry, most recently the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw. Her poems have been translated into twenty languages, and book-length collections of her poems have been published in Italian, German, Swedish, Portuguese and English (Tideline, Zephyr Press, 2022). In the US her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Washington Square Review, Ploughshares and POETRY, among others. Her translations into Polish include the poetry of W. C. Williams, Thom Gunn, Charles Simic, Kim Moore, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Louise Glück.
Karen Kovacik, a poet and translator, is the author of the collections Metropolis Burning, Beyond the Velvet Curtain, and Nixon and I. In addition to being one of three translators who brought Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline into English, she also translated Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture, finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Agnieszka Kuciak’s Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets Who Don’t Exist, longlisted for the National Translation Award in 2014. She is also the editor of Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets. For her translation work, she has been awarded a Fulbright research grant to Poland and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translations have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, Southern Review, and World Literature Today.